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If you’re in the business of Internet marketing, chances are you are not focusing on local clientele and traffic. Internet marketers in general market to a broad base of people, from all over the world. The interests of these people could vary, such as to whatever offer is hot this week on your preferred affiliate network. While there’s nothing wrong with doing this, there are several other ways to make money, including going local.

Creating a local-based website in a small niche is probably one of the strongest business models you could ever make. Marketing to your town, municipality, or city has its benefits, including local advertisers. While the subject areas are virtually endless to what you could start a website around, I’ll give you an example for the purpose of this post.

Let’s say Maggie wanted to create a website based on seasonal flowers for the climate conditions in her area. She sets up a blog and updates it 3-5 times a week with fresh new content on her area of expertise — flowers. Based on Maggie’s knowledge of flowers, she comes up with endless things to write about and relates her topics to a local audience, such as mentioning the best stores or greenhouses to purchase flowers X and Y.

To get the word out about her new blog, she creates a Facebook page and begins posting updates in her status about her new venture. Chances are most of Maggie’s Facebook friends live in her area, as is the case most of the time with social networking lists. Maggie also uses Twitter’s advanced search option to find people living 15 miles or closer to her specific location. She could then follow them and send out tweets telling those who follow back about her blog. Between Facebook and Twitter alone, Maggie could easily come up with a few hundred hits per day using these free traffic methods.

Once traffic numbers begin to climb and remain steady, Maggie should consider going after local advertisers to support her blog. I’d give it 3-6 months before you start e-mailing and calling advertisers in your area. Most would like to see some sort of track record and traffic data to make sure you aren’t some type of scam artist who closes down the site the minute they pay you.

However, local advertisers are much more trust worthy and more likely to advertise with you than if you were to seek out international advertisers for a larger niche site. If your content is good enough, you may even be so fortunate as to have the local newspaper or TV stations do a piece based on your blog. I’ve seen it happen many times before in my area.

I’d highly recommend going local and trying it out. The traffic is very loyal as you’ll soon find out, and people will become more engaged in what you have to say because they feel they can relate to you.

Local traffic can be great, especially if you live in a tourist destination. I’ve seen quite a few Orlando sites with regular local visitors, and out of town following. It’s always good to think outside the box.